Chapter 26

Irina and I stood frozen in place.

“It’s true, Bill. I told Greg where the disks were. I hoped it would keep him from going after you. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you when you were telling me your suspicions.”

“It’s OK,” I said. “I didn’t want to believe it about Greg either. I should have just handed over the code from the beginning without trying to be smart and putting those glitches in it. I put Harry in danger. You. Everyone. Now, Alec Hudson is dead…”

“It’s not your fault. You blame yourself too much. You were being loyal to the trust Justin put in you.”

“Damn that trust! Look what it’s done!”

“Bill, you are a good person. You are loyal. It’s Greg who is disloyal and murderous.”

I looked into Irina’s eyes. We clung to each other tightly.

“He’s planning to kill us, isn’t he?” Irina whispered. “That’s why he was talking over the sound system, so he wouldn’t have to look at us, isn’t it? And calling you by your last name to put you at a distance and make it easier for him to do it?”

“Yes. I’m afraid he’s decided to kill us.”

But not without a fight, I added to myself.

I pushed Irina away gently, and gestured to her to help scan the room. “Let’s try to spot that thing Greg sent in here,” I called to her. “Do you see where it…”

Karrah-rammm! The Bosendorfer came to life, pouring out ear-rending cadenzas. Crashing up and down the scale, the notes sounded the ‘diabolus’ interval: the raucous, hee-hawing siren sound given off by ambulances and emergency vehicles, the tones that Anne Frank had heard as Nazi trucks rounded up victims for the gas ovens.

The chords from the great instrument cut like sabers through my skull. I could see Irina wince with pain. So this was how Greg would not hear us if we yelled to him—the piano would drown us out.

We plugged our fingers in our ears, but it did little good, as the sound simply pried right through them. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the Bosendorfer fell silent. I peered into the dark. I could see nothing. My ears were ringing from the piano chords, but it seemed I could hear something making a soft whirring sound.

I heard it again, a bit louder. It sounded high and to our right, gradually approaching.

Then, we both saw it: a profile silhouetted against one of the ceiling spotlights like a cloud across the moon. Greg’s helium mini-blimp! The whirring was from the small motors driving the blimp’s twin propellers.

Above the constant whir of the motors, I could make out an intermittent whir of higher pitch. I’d heard it before, in Greg’s lab. It came from the little servo-motors which drove the scanner mirrors he had integrated into his experimental infrared vision system.

The blimp could see in the dark. And it was looking for us.

“Stay still,” I said to Irina. “The blimp’s camera probably looks for things that move.”

As if on cue from my words, the blimp halted and swung about. Instead of a longish profile, the blimp’s shape had become round like a basketball, which meant it was headed straight at us.

A deep ruby glow lit up the blimp’s nose. Crack! A pencil beam of laser light grazed my ear like a hot icicle. Greg’s high-energy micro laser! An acrid, smoky smell rose from the deep tear in the fabric wall just behind my head.

“Are you ok?” Irina exclaimed.

“Don’t say anything!” I whispered urgently. “It goes after voice, too.”

I pointed to the piano. In a crouch, we crept along the wall toward the Bosendorfer for cover. The blimp hung in mid-air as if undecided where next to turn, then swung about and headed in our direction. I reached behind me and, grasping Irina’s shoulder, pushed her to the floor, then pressed myself flat against the wall.

Crack! Another burst of red light cut through the darkness. A dagger of pain stabbed at my right jaw and neck. I ducked down and pressed my hand against the stinging flesh. The wound seemed bloodless—just hot and sticky.

While alerted by either movement or voice, the blimp seemed to shoot only for the face. How soon would it shoot again? I remembered Greg’s student Tamara saying the laser’s capacitors needed ten seconds to re-charge. I signaled to Irina, and we dashed the rest of the way to the black bulk of the piano.

Amidst the clutter of equipment—video monitors, oscilloscopes, keyboards, phones, patch-panels and such—that littered the space behind the Bosendorfer, I spotted a store-dummy head with glassy eyes. Greg and his students must have used it for testing out their face-and-eye tracking programs.

I snatched the head up and set it under the piano lid so that it looked out into The Block. If the blimp favored going after faces and eyes, then let it try blasting at that for a change.

The blimp drifted about The Block, its altitude about shoulder height. Its nose swung left and right, relentless yet indecisive—as if not sure of where next to search us down.

Irina quickly whispered a plan to me. It could work. I nodded yes.

Shielding her face from the blimp’s scanners with one hand, Irina reached down with the other and picked up an extension phone that lay on the floor. Moving very slowly, she placed the phone under the piano lid next to where I’d set the dummy head. Then, ducking for cover, she gestured toward the piano lid. I nodded back, and got myself into position at the keyboard end of the Bosendorfer.

Irina reached under the piano lid and removed the phone’s receiver. Working by touch, she tapped in a number, switched the instrument onto speakerphone, set it at peak loudness, and drew her arm back. After three rings, my recorded voice came on the line: “This is Bill Rundle. I’m not in my office now, but if you’d…”

The blimp halted in mid-air, gunned its propellers, and swung about to face the Bosendorfer, the dummy head peering out from under its upturned lid. Having heard my voice, the blimp now surged toward the source, its video camera seeking a face and eye to match.

Irina and I crouched behind the piano, putting our hands over our faces and squinting through our fingers so that the only face image presented to the blimp was that of the dummy.

Crack! The laser beam seared through the right eye of the dummy head and ripped into the wood of the lid beyond.

The blimp glided forward, its nose now maybe twenty feet from the piano. I counted off the seconds to myself. Ten to recharge, and then the dummy would get it again.

There was another flash from the blimp’s nose, accompanied by a crisp crack. The dummy’s left eye blew away, leaving a smoldering hole.

By now, the blimp had a third of its length under the lid of the Bosendorfer. I leapt up and tripped away the mahogany strut supporting the piano’s massive lid, which crunched down on the blimp like a sperm whale biting through a rowboat.

“Let’s get that laser out,” I said. “It may be our only hope when Greg gets back.”

I heaved the piano lid back up while Irina pushed the strut back into place. With one hand she covered her face, and with the other, covered mine. Squinting through Irina’s fingers, I reached over the blimp’s wreckage and dragged the laser unit out, the camera coming along with it.

Was it still working? The camera’s scanning mirrors were flapping frenetically like the fins and tail of a freshly gaffed fish. Quickly, I set the camera and laser on the floor next to the piano, and we both swung around to face away from it.

We’d won this round with Greg’s blimp. But the next round would be with Greg himself. He had just re-entered The Block, kicked on the main lights, and was looking down at us from high up on the catwalk.